Aristide Maillol was born on
April 8, 1861, at Banyuls in the Pyrenees, where his family lived
by fishing and growing vines. This Mediterranean environment
may account for his later admiration for ancient sculpture. He
went to school in Banyuls and to college in Perpignan, where
he copied plaster casts at the city museum. At 21 he went to
Paris. His teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the painter Jean
Leon Gerome, sent him on to the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, where
he was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel for four years.

The objects of Maillol's most
careful study were the pictures in the Louvre and the medieval
tapestries in the Cluny museum. The paintings of his contemporaries
Pierre
Puvis de Chavannes and Paul
Gauguin gave direction to his own painting and pointed out
to him the need for the decorative elements to predominate in
a work of art. He decided to manufacture tapestries and to that
end started a small studio in Banyuls, employing village girls
on the weaving and using home-made dyes. Gauguin
admired a tapestry of his shown in Brussels in 1894 with Les
XX and later in Paris.

Maillol moved to Paris in 1895
and settled three years afterwards in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges.
He had great difficulty in making a living, until friends recommended
him to a wealthy patron, who commissioned several tapestries.
During their fabrication Maillol's eyesight weakened and for
several months he was completely blind. In order to save the
strain on his eyes, he turned instead to sculpture, producing
carvings and terracottas that at first reflected, then reacted
against, the style of Auguste
Rodin.

In about 1900 the painter Edouard
Vuillard brought his friend Ambroise Vollard to Villeneuve-Saint-Georges.
The young dealer bought some sculptures, which he then had cast
in bronze, and in 1902 organized a Maillol exhibition in Paris,
at which Rodin
acquired a bronze figurine and the Leda was sold to the critic
Octave Mirbeau. Maillol began to show regularly at the Paris
Salon d'Automne and attracted attention which sometimes took
the form of virulent criticism. His entry for a competition in
1903 for a monument to the writer Emile Zola was rejected in
favor of Constantin Meunier's.

In 1908, with his German friend
and patron Count Kessler, Maillol traveled to Greece by way of
Naples and Pompeii. This journey reinforced his feelings for
early Greek art, very evident in the version of Pomona that he
submitted to the Salon d'Automne of 1910. He then received the
commission for a monument to Cezanne.

His work was interrupted by World
War I when, through his association with Count Kessler, he was
accused, though not convicted, of spying. His large post war
commemorative statues include a monument to the dead of Banyuls.
He also spent some time in later life producing woodcut and lithograph
illustrations to Latin authors. He died in October, 1944, after
a road accident near Banyuls.

Maillol's sculpture was closely
related to the female human form, which he represented in simple,
solid, basic volumes, never allowing his instinct for decorative
line to predominate. Renoir,
who took to sculpture late in life, was influenced by him, just
as he had been influenced by Renoir's
paintings.